The advent of global communications networks such as the Internet has presented commercial opportunities for reaching vast numbers of potential customers. In particular, various types of businesses offering their services or their products for sale have flooded the Internet with their advertisements through one or more various channels. For example, most businesses or advertisers are made known to users via their respective websites in search results.
Currently, a typical search result display can include paid placement listings as well as paid inclusion listings. Paid placement listings may also be known as “sponsored sites” which are based on a bidding system. Companies who are willing to pay more per click will receive a higher ranking on a hit list. That is, position on the hit list goes to the one willing to pay the most for a mouse click. Paid placement listings are associated with a key word. Thus, when a particular key word appears in a query, then the highest-bidding company connected to that key word may be positioned at the top of the sponsored site list. The sponsored site listing provides special formatting, hence drawing the web user's attention to the listed sites. However, from the business perspective, paid placement can be and is usually very expensive and for most companies, is cost-prohibitive or not cost-effective despite the special formatting and preferential placement on the user's display.
An alternative to paid placement is paid inclusion listings. Unlike paid placement listings, paid inclusion listings are not influenced by payment. Instead paid inclusion listings are ranked by relevance according to a main search algorithm. For example, a paid inclusion customer injects many URLs along with the content associated with those webpages into a search engine. Thus, whenever search terms appear to match those terms in any particular webpage, the relevant webpage(s) can be included in the search results according to the search algorithm. In general, paid inclusion listings can be algorithmically selected to be included in a particular search result display based on their relevance with respect to the search terms and can be ranked accordingly.
Although less expensive than paid placement listings, paid inclusion listings can also be problematic and may not always be as cost-effective at least from the advertiser's perspective for many reasons. For example, poor listing performance can result despite frequency refresh rates. In addition, the user may have difficulty in viewing and/or distinguishing between paid inclusion listings especially when a large number of search results are returned.